The Caisse has promised trains will leave every three to six minutes from the South Shore and every six to 12 minutes on the West Island and Deux Montagnes Line, for the duration of its 20-hour operation schedule from 5 a.m. to 1:20 a.m.

Sometimes you wonder just how much information municipal councillors have before making decisions. Often it looks like election campaigns are on run on the theme of “transparency” and then we govern in deep “opacity.” No wonder town councillors look like they know very little about what’s really going on: they often don’t.

I recently had an exchange with one of my local councillors in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue about how much land might need to be expropriated, at what cost and with what potential impact on taxes in the Special Planning Program being developed for 2016.

The answer from my councillor was, “I don’t know.”

So how can you make a decision?

For example, how much will it cost to expropriate land? What will be the cost of the debt to pay for that expropriation? How much tax do we receive now for that land? And, by consequence, how much will we not be receiving after the forced acquisition, a sum which must be added to the total cost of the operation?

So, do the four councillors who form a majority on Ste-Anne council know how much the proposed Special Planning Program might cost? Have they read the fiscal impact study prepared by the landowner’s team? Has anyone in the town administration prepared a financial scenario to guide the council?

Then you realize that my councillor isn’t well informed because it is his “understanding that the town has met with” the landowners “but only through the director general.”

Shouldn’t council be aware of the principal landowners’ positions?

Has the town got all the information needed for a balanced and productive solution?

Naturally, part-time councillors will have a lot less information than full-time mayors and director generals. If a mayor is paid three times as much as councillors, the mayor should know three times as much, no? The mayor is paid to go to all those meetings and read those 2,000 pages from the agglomeration every month. The mayor and/or the director general gets all the town correspondence, no?

Nevertheless, sometimes you have to wonder just how much information mayors and directors general decide to share with councillors before asking them to make decisions.

So I return to the question of Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue’s and Pierrefonds’ zoning plans which, you would think, might have shifted dramatically with the announcement a couple of weeks ago of the Caisse de dépôt’s train project. If our pension fund and two levels of governments are planning to build a new commuter rail service out as far as Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue by 2020, maybe we should be thinking about building residential projects to house the future commuters who will be needed to pay for this ambitious transit project. And, remember, it is an article of green faith that you need population density around transit hubs to pay for them.

Which could mean, in the case of Ste-Anne, looking again at the special planning program developed under former mayor Francis Deroo back during his four years at town hall. That plan included up to 4,000 new residents. It’s actually a planning concept that goes back to the 1980s. It was in that period that our council did an about-face and re-designated the land in the north sector of Ste-Anne below the hydro lines industrial and commercial, using the hydro servitude as a buffer zone to protect residents.

It was probably the public outcry against the Special Planning Program that discouraged Deroo from running again in 2013. But the situation has changed. If there is a train whose profitability is linked to our pensions, then we need people to buy tickets.

With all due respect to the Sauvons L’Anse-à-l’Orme lobby trying to save Pierrefonds from development and the fans of the Ste-Anne eco-territory, we will soon be needing hundreds of train-riders.

The Special Planning Program that Ste-Anne’s urban planners are currently working on is an eco-territory version. Maybe they should be re-considering the 2012 version.

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